Maynard Institute archives

Reporter Killed in Community She Loved

by richard0655

Charnice Milton Slain in D.C. While Used as Human Shield

Bettinger to Step Down as Director of Knight Fellowships

N.C., Texas Schools Confront Confederate Iconography

. . . Monuments “Inseparable From Jim Crow, White Supremacy”

He Might Have Been First Chinese American Journalist

19 News Organizations Challenge Gag Order in Baltimore

Clinton’s Pick for Latino Outreach Leaves Some Unimpressed

Dallas Anchor Gets a Doctorate at 61, Just Because

Columnist Bob Ray Sanders Retires in Fort Worth

Don Haney Dies at 80, Helped Break Detroit Color Barrier

Short Takes

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, center, and Police Chief Cathy Lanier appeal to the public for help in apprehending the killer of reporter Charnice Milton. (video)

Charnice Milton Slain in D.C. While Used as Human Shield

A 27-year-old African American reporter who committed herself to covering the blackest, most neglected portion of the District of Columbia was shot to death Wednesday night when, police said, she was used as a human shield in an exchange of gunfire by two groups of dirt bike riders.

Charnice Milton, who lived east of the Anacostia River, the area she covered, was a contributor to Capital Community News and a graduate of Ball State and the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. She was shot as she walked on one of the area’s major streets to transfer buses. Milton had covered the monthly meeting of a community advisory committee.

” ‘At 9:28, she texted me and said, “I’m on my way home,” ‘ the victim’s mother, Francine Milton, said,” Derrick Ward and Andrea Swalec reported Friday for Washington’s WRC-TV, the NBC-owned and -operated station. ‘So, I was waiting for her to text me back and let me know if she needed me to pick her up, if she needed us, where she was. And we never got that text last night.’ . . .” Their daughter was rushed to a hospital, where she died.

Perry Stein added for the Washington Post, “Milton largely wrote about news in Wards 7 and 8 and those she encountered while reporting said she was determined to show that these neighborhoods are more than just the city’s poorer wards, but rather communities filled with hardworking individuals who want to make the city better.”

“Her editor, Andrew Lightman, the managing editor of Capital Community News, noted that Milton was one of the few people in the city doing that grassroots level reporting in the east of the river communities. Her loss, he said, will be felt in those stories that will no longer get covered.

” ‘Not only did they gun down a young woman, they also silenced one of our reporters,’ Lightman said. ‘I think it’s a real loss not only for us and her family but also the communities that she covered . . . She was one of a handful of reporters across the District who was looking at the nuts and bolts of everyday life.’ . . . “

Milton’s parents “say she overcame speech problems early in life to get a full communications scholarship to Ball State University after graduating from Bishop McNamara High. She eventually received a masters degree from Syracuse,” according to a story by Jennifer Donelan and Tom Roussey of WJLA-TV, the ABC affiliate.

“She loved to cover the area east of the Anacostia where she grew up.

” ‘She could have worked at any news media organization she wanted to,’ said her father Ken McClenton. ‘She had the credentials, she had the expertise, she had the knowledge, but she sacrificed and she stayed and wrote in Ward 8.’

” ‘Everyone says the same thing, that she was just a beautiful young lady,’ said Francine Milton, the victim’s mother. ‘And she loved to write, and she loved people. And most of all she loved God.’ . . .”

Mayor Muriel Bowser called for the public’s help while out on her community walk Thursday, WTTG-TV, the Fox affiliate, reported.

” ‘We want to know,’ said Bowser. ‘We know that people were in and around the area. We have gotten very little information and we need the public to provide that information so Charnice’s killer can be captured.’ . . .”

Bettinger to Step Down as Director of Knight Fellowships

James R. Bettinger, who brought a rarely seen emphasis on diversity to journalism fellowship programs, announced on Thursday that the next academic year will be his last as director of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships program at Stanford University.

He wrote Thursday, “The program is in great shape, better than it’s ever been, so the time is right. We’ve accomplished a lot. Now I want to seek new ways to shape journalism for the better. I’ll be glad to pass the torch to a new director.

“If you ask me about what we have accomplished, I’ll happily hold forth on the achievements of our outstanding Fellows, and the staff that fueled their successes. But I want to put a big bold frame around two highlights: our shift in emphasis to journalism innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership in 2009, and our continuing commitment to diversity in all aspects of our program. I think they’ve helped distinguish us immeasurably.

“I’m retiring from this job — but not from journalism. I’ve worked in journalism institutions and organizations for nearly 50 years — 20 years with the Riverside Press-Enterprise and the San Jose Mercury News, and 26 with this program. Now I want to work more independently and entrepreneurially. I intend to use what I’ve learned at JSK, and before that in daily newspapers, to help others. I’ll be eager to learn some new dance steps. Stay tuned.”

In a tribute to Dori J. Maynard, who died in February, Sally Lehrman wrote for the Maynard Institute, “When the JSK program went two years without any African Americans involved, Director Jim Bettinger gave Maynard what he described as a ‘sheepish’ call. Maynard, not known for letting anyone get away with anything, didn’t wag her finger. She simply offered simple, smart and ultimately very effective strategies for change. She suggested people to talk to and gatherings to attend.

“As a result of his recruitment efforts, the 2013 program year included seven people of color out of thirteen U.S. fellows and three were African Americans. ‘It’s hard to ask for help if you feel like a failure,’ Bettinger said. ‘You don’t come back for more. On the flip side, if you don’t get shot down, you do come back again.’ . . .”

Seven of the 12 journalists chosen for Knight Journalism Fellowships for 2014-15 at Stanford were people of color, as are five of the 12 chosen for 2015-16. Stanford will conduct a national search for Bettinger’s successor, he told Journal-isms.

Bettinger, 68, came to the fellowships program as deputy director in 1989 and was named director in 2000. He was a Stanford Professional Journalism Fellow in 1982-83.

N.C., Texas Schools Confront Confederate Iconography

“Trustees at the country’s oldest public university decided Thursday to rename a University of North Carolina classroom building so that it no longer carries the name of a 19th century Ku Klux Klan leader,” Emery P. Dalesio reported for the Associated Press, an action that follows protests by black students and judged deficient by the Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper.

Meanwhile, Mac McCann reported in a 4,500-word piece Friday for the Austin Chronicle, the alternative newspaper in Austin, Texas, that some students at the University of Texas at Austin “— the new student government included — are generating attention once more by advocating for the removal of the statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, one of several Confederate monuments that stand tall on the campus. As the student body pushes for the Davis statue’s removal, UT is confronting its legacy of racism, immortalized in those monuments. . . .”

The decision at UNC “reverses one made in 1920 to honor William Saunders, a Confederate officer and politician credited with helping to preserve colonial records,” Dalesio wrote Thursday. “But university trustees 95 years ago also praised Saunders for his post-Civil War leadership of the Klan, a violent white supremacist group that aimed to overthrow elected state governments and reverse rights granted to newly emancipated slaves. . . .”

The renaming of Saunders Hall to “Carolina Hall” does not please protesters who wanted the name to honor folklorist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, as Ishmael Bishop wrote in an op-ed piece Friday in the Daily Tar Heel. In 1939, prior to integration, Hurston became the first black student to take classes at UNC.

The Tar Heel itself has not editorialized on the issue, summer editor Sam Schaefer, a member of the editorial board, told Journal-isms by email.

“As we are a weekly publication for the Summer, our formal editorial about Carolina Hall will most likely be forthcoming next week, though I can assure you our summer editorial team has already had discussions about the name change. We think the choice of ‘Carolina Hall’ is a slap in the face of activists who brought this issue to national attention, we think the comments of some trustees telling activists to focus on ‘more important’ issues were foolhardy and hypocritical, and we think the 16-year ban on renaming any building on campus is cowardly,” he wrote.

Asked to elaborate and to explain the ban, also voted Thursday, Schaefer added, “The Board of Trustees passed a 16-year ban on renaming any campus monument, memorial, building or landscape, which they said was in order to allow for time for these kinds of issues to get a full hearing across multiple generations of students and trustees. While the ban is formally meaningless, since they could revoke it at any time they choose, we feel that the 16-year ban signals that they are not interested in hearing the voices of student activists.

“We think the choice of ‘Carolina Hall’ (besides being hopelessly milquetoast) is a slap in the face of activists because activists have proposed their choice of Hurston Hall as a way of highlighting the voices of people of color, and ‘Carolina Hall’ seems to be a way of whitewashing an issue that is very explicitly about race.

“The ‘contextualized’ plaque that will accompany the new name on the hall is so vague as to be very near meaningless. Even if the board found the evidence of Hurston’s connection to UNC to be tenuous, there are many other people of color in the University’s history who would have made for excellent choices for the hall, and at the very least, they could have opened up the process for further public input and deliberation. Shallow ‘unity’ rings false when the divides on campus are very real — the board’s decisions may have just deepened them.”

Last month, the Tar Heel editorial board noted its own lack of diversity and appealed for applicants.

Schaefer told Journal-isms, “Our board will indeed be more diverse next year, and we received more applications from women and students of color, as hoped, though the board is still not entirely representative of the UNC student body. We’re doing better than last year, but only marginally.”

. . . Monuments “Inseparable From Jim Crow, White Supremacy”

In 1997, Kirk Savage, a professor of the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, wrote “Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America.” Journal-isms asked him about an argument that since the South lost the Civil War, the Confederate monuments are harmless or even a testimony to black liberation.

“I have an example of a similar response published in an African American newspaper in Richmond in 1890,” Savage replied by email. “The Confederacy did lose and slavery was abolished, and as terrible as Jim Crow was, slavery was worse. But Jim Crow wasn’t just segregation, it was violence and intimidation and murder too. And all these Confederate monuments are inseparable from Jim Crow and white supremacy.

“The monuments helped consolidate white supremacy across the South. They were the cultural arm of a political campaign that is still bearing its terrible fruit in Ferguson, Baltimore, and on and on. The monuments worked by uniting whites around the banner of the Lost Cause, rewriting the history of the Confederacy, and erasing the memory of Unionism and slavery and everything else that didn’t fit the Lost Cause picture.

“The CSA [Confederate States of America] was an apartheid state — only a minority of its human population actually supported the Confederacy. White unionists and slaves outnumbered the Confederates across much of the South. Where are the monuments to the unionists who risked their lives and livelihood to harbor escaped Union prisoners or guide Union soldiers and civilians back to Union lines?

“Who in the white South even knows these people once existed? The monuments of the Lost Cause worked because they erased all that — they gave whites a glorious tradition and ritual that supported white rule and the suppression of any alternative racial politics.

“I’m not in favor of tearing down these monuments but I do think we could use them as teaching tools, to show how they contributed to a deadly century-long campaign of political repression that still has many lingering impacts in our world today. And I think we could use more public recognition for all those black and white who resisted the Confederacy and resisted the Lost Cause.”

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Wong Chin Foo (video)

He Might Have Been First Chinese American Journalist

“The first Chinese American journalist may have been Wong Chin Foo,” Randall Yip wrote Monday for his AsAmNews.

“Check out this brief story on Wong from the 2003 Bill Moyers special, Becoming American: The Chinese Experience.” (video)

19 News Organizations Challenge Gag Order in Baltimore

“The Associated Press and 18 other news organizations asked a judge Friday to deny prosecutors’ request for a gag order in the case against six Baltimore police officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray, who sustained a severe spinal injury in police custody,” the news service reported.

“The motion filed in Baltimore City Circuit Court contends such an order would violate free speech provisions of the U.S. and Maryland constitutions.

” ‘Transparency is most needed in cases asserting governmental wrongdoing. This is particularly true when allegations of governmental wrongdoing are levied by both sides, against police officers and prosecutors alike,’ attorney Nathan Siegel wrote on behalf of the news organizations.

The AP also wrote, “The other news outlets are The Baltimore Sun, Hearst Stations Inc., Sinclair Broadcasting, CBS Broadcasting Inc., Scripps Media Inc., ABC News, Bloomberg News, [BuzzFeed], CNN, Fox News, Gannett, NBC News, National Public Radio, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the [Reporters] Committee for Freedom of the Press.”

Dallas Anchor Gets a Doctorate at 61, Just Because

“Chances are that you will never see the full credentials used, so let’s give him his due just this once,” columnist Steve Blow wrote Thursday for the Dallas Morning News.

“Dr. John McCaa, Ph.D., I mean.

“I always thought of the news anchor at WFAA-TV (Channel 8) as a class act. Now I know he’s also had lots of classes.

“Congratulations to all those receiving diplomas in this graduation season. But I’m especially impressed with John, who just earned his doctor of philosophy from the University of Texas at Dallas.

“And will he be ‘Dr. McCaa’ on the TV set now? He laughed. ‘No, I won’t do that,’ he said.

“But what a great role model. If he won’t toot his own horn, I’ll do it for him.

“At age 61 and with 31 years on the job, it’s not like he needed the degree for career advancement. This was education just for education’s sake.

“The one practical application, he hopes, will be in his weekly commentary during the 6 p.m. Friday broadcasts.

” ‘Commentary is context,’ he said. And the more education you have, the more complete the context you can provide, he believes.

” ‘These days, people’s idea of reaching back for political context is quoting Ronald Reagan,’ he said. He prefers The Federalist Papers or Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.

” ‘I’m pretty old-school about things,’ he said. . . .”

Columnist Bob Ray Sanders Retires in Fort Worth

Bob Ray Sanders, a columnist and associate editor at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram known for decrying capital punishment and defending the unfairly accused, announced his retirement Friday. It comes shortly after another black columnist, Merlene Davis of the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, told readers that she, too, is leaving.

Bob Ray Sanders “By the time you read this I will have retired from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the place where I began my journalism career more than four decades ago. And, after a 20-year absence, it was the place that I came ‘home’ to and where I complete the journey, Sanders wrote.

He added that “the regret is that while we’ve made tremendous progress in this state and country on the issue of capital punishment, we have not been able to completely abolish it.

“I reflect on the number of times I’ve watched two mothers crying, one because her son was dead, the other because her son killed him.

“Yet, I also think about the number of young men and women I’ve been able to assist in some way, and to share their stories of accomplishments that helped others.

“While I’ve been able to witness many historical events in my career and talk with some of the most powerful and influential people in the country, the real joy came in being able to write about extraordinary people who were not famous, but whose lives, conditions and achievements begged to be written about. . . .”

According to one bio, “Sanders’ journalism career has spanned more than three decades and three media: newspaper, television and radio. . . . He worked many years at the Dallas/Fort Worth PBS affiliate, where he served as reporter, producer, station manager, and vice president.”

Don Haney Dies at 80, Helped Break Detroit Color Barrier

“Memorial services will be held Saturday for Don Haney, a longtime newsman and commentator who helped break the color barrier in Detroit broadcasting in the 1960s,” Tim Kiska reported Friday for the Detroit Free Press. “Haney, 80, died March 24 in Little Rock, Ark., where he moved nine years ago.

“Haney grew up in Detroit, the son of Mack Haney, who owned a funeral home in the city’s African-American neighborhood known as Black Bottom. Even as a youngster at Northern High School, Haney hoped to become a broadcaster.

“He came face-to-face with racism in the media when in the 1950s he dropped off a job application and demonstration disk of his work to Channel 4, the leading news station in town at the time. He said he was told: ‘You’re a damned fool for trying to get a job at a white station.’

“Undeterred, Haney moved to Canada, where he got work in London, Kitchener and St. Thomas, Ontario. He returned to Detroit in 1964 as an announcer at WJR-AM (760), the first African American in that post.

“He joined Channel 7 (WXYZ-TV) late in 1967. Media coverage of the riot that year, in which 43 people died, made it painfully clear that Detroit’s airwaves were almost totally devoid of African-American representation. Haney was hired by Channel 7 in late 1967.

” ‘He was a pioneer, no question about it. There weren’t many African-Americans on the air when he got here.’ said Chuck Stokes, Channel 7’s public affairs director. ‘He opened a lot of doors, and handled himself in a such a dignified way. I think he commanded a lot of respect.’ . . .”

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